


Soldiers of Misfortune

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Cuban revolution, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, a story of love and revolution and cigars, cuba 1956-1959, various historical figures - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:22:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26528932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “Are you serious?” Nile exclaims. “Che Guevara kicked you and Nicky out of the Cuban Revolution because he caught you kissing?”“In the end he begged us to stay,” Joe says.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 90
Kudos: 512





	Soldiers of Misfortune

**Author's Note:**

> Completely and unapologetically inspired by that one photo on Copley's wall. See end notes for disclaimer.

The twentieth century, Nicky tells Nile, is hardly worth remembering.

“One hundred years of shit,” he says, and Joe—sprawled on the couch, ostensibly watching the game—is mildly alarmed to hear him sound so much like Andy. “I have forgotten most of it.”

“C’mon, Nicky,” Nile protests. “I saw the photos on Copley’s wall—you guys were _everywhere_ , it was like looking through a history textbook; actually, I think you _were_ in my tenth-grade—”

“Me, I’m nostalgic for the eighteenth century,” Joe interposes, trying to divert the flow of the conversation. “Enlightenment, revolutions in America, France and Haiti… Nicky and I have always been partial to revolutions.”

“We never got along well with _anciens régimes_ ,” Nicky agrees. “Revolutionaries, insurgents, and freedom fighters run more to our taste.”

“Though we don’t care much for reigns of terror, either,” Joe adds, recalling the terrible efficacy of Dr. Guillotin’s beheading machine—the swish of the blade, the sickening thunk of the head falling into the basket, rise and repeat, until the steps to the scaffold ran slippery with blood.

“But how can you know? When you’re in it, I mean. You think you’re fighting a revolution, but somewhere along the way it turns into a reign of terror…” Nile looks at them doubtfully, and Joe sees Nicky’s shoulders slump a little.

“We don’t, always,” Nicky replies. “But we are foot soldiers, not politicians. We don’t—how do you say?—we don’t walk in the corridors of power. Is that right, Joe? Corridors of power?”

Joe nods. “I think that’s how you say it, yes.”

“We try to ally ourselves with ideas, not ideologies. Causes, not individuals. But sometimes we get it wrong.” Nicky spreads his hands and meets Joe’s eyes ruefully. “I got most of the twentieth century wrong.”

“What do you mean?” Nile says.

“Nicky became something of a communist in the twentieth century,” Joe says, and raises his eyebrows at the expression on his beloved’s face. “What? You did.”

“No, I simply came to recognize the, ah, the insidious role that capital plays, in the great evils of the world,” Nicky clarifies.

“Like I said, a communist.” Joe grins.

“There _is_ a distinction,” his stubborn Nicolò insists, “though admittedly one I came to understand too late.”

“What do you mean?” Nile repeats, a certain edge to her voice.

Joe has known Nile several months now and understands that edge to mean she is hoping they can offer her some kind of skeleton key to unlock the riddles of history. Joe often wishes he possessed such a key himself.

“Unique as we are, we don’t have any solution to the world’s problems,” he admits. “For a while we tried in a socialist way to… grope towards some future where the world would be less of a shitty, miserable place. But if Karl Marx was unable to do it, then I guess there’s no way four old assholes from the wrong century could, either.” 

“But you… tried?” Nile asks.

“Mi scusi.” Nicky shoves his chair back abruptly. He collects his sword and slips out the back door without another word.

“Did I—” Nile stares after him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s not you he’s angry with.” Joe switches off the television and ambles over to join her at the table. Nicolò will be fine; he’ll work out his frustrations with his sword, then come back inside to start supper. Nile, on the other hand, looks deeply troubled. Joe squeezes her shoulder reassuringly.

“It all began off the coast of Mexico, Nile, in a leaky little boat…”

***

“This boat is going to sink,” Yusuf said. He said it in Arabic, for Nicolò’s ears only.

“Yes, probably,” Nicky agreed equably.

“Twenty people, maximum,” he said. “We are eighty-five.”

“If you count the three of us, yes.”

“We bear weight, don’t we? It is appallingly stupid.”

“We must hope for the best.” His Nicolò gave him a tiny smile. It was just past two in the morning, and the port city of Tuxpan had shrunk to a few distant pinpricks of light behind them as the yacht chugged out of the bay, sitting very low in the water indeed.

“How long is this supposed to take?” Booker demanded, ubiquitous flask clutched tightly in his fist.

“Five days, supposedly,” Nicky said. “I estimate at least seven.”

The _Granma_ ’s diesel engines were in desperate need of repair. The decrepit vessel was laden down with fuel, weapons, food, and eighty-two Cuban revolutionaries, plus three immortal mercenaries. It was the very pinnacle of lunacy, Joe thought.

“I feel sick,” Booker mumbled. He never traveled well by sea.

Nicolò di Genova, being of maritime stock, had always been invigorated by the salt sea air, but he still found it in him to be sympathetic to Booker’s plight. Joe watched him scan the deck until he found the man he was looking for. “Argentino!” Nicky called. 

“Italiano?” the man returned, eyebrows raised.

“Won’t you come to Sebastián’s aid, doctor? The ocean disagrees with him.”

“Then his best option is to keep drinking,” the Argentine said.   
  


*

  
Fidel was a pompous windbag, Yusuf thought.

They’d nearly sunk off the coast of the Yucatán, forced to bail by hand until Nicky managed to repair the bilge pumps. Then a man fell overboard, and they spent hours searching for him; he was rescued at great expense to their fuel stores. And now Fidel had the audacity to lecture his seasick, miserable troops as they huddled shoulder to shoulder on the yacht’s pitching deck. Joe doubted anyone was really listening. Booker was hunched over the rail, puking, and Nicky was asleep against his shoulder. Rations had run out yesterday. As Nicky had predicted, five days was a conservative estimate, and they’d now been at sea for six. Nonetheless, Joe pasted an alert expression on his face and tried to appear interested. He was pretty sure Fidel was just repeating himself at this point:

“…twenty percent of Cubans are unemployed. One and a half percent of the landowners control fifty percent of the land. Half the population has no electricity. Forty percent can’t read or write. The thugs of Batista’s dictatorship gun down anyone who speaks out…”

It was a good thing, Yusuf thought, that Andromache was already in Havana. She had very little patience for pompous windbags.  
  


*

  
The Cuban Army was waiting for them when they landed. Between the bullets and the napalm, they were butchered like lambs at the slaughter. The twenty or so who survived escaped to the mountains in small groups, and for days they wandered around looking for each other.

Joe, Nicky, and Booker had—more or less inevitably—survived the botched landing, and as they tramped through the Sierra Maestra, even Nicky had to concede how catastrophically awry the whole thing had gone. _Tits up_ , to use one of Booker’s cruder expressions. Quixotic from the start, the mission now seemed utterly doomed.

“If we can make our way to Havana, then we can find Andy and get the hell out of here,” Booker said gloomily as they crouched around their campfire one night. “Face it, guys, this is fucked.”

Joe exchanged a glance with Nicky. Only that morning his Nicolò had been bitten by a venomous snake and died a particularly agonizing death. Yusuf had held him in his arms, murmuring to him in a mixture of Italian and Arabic, stroking his brow, until he succumbed and woke up again.

“I think we should keep searching,” Nicky said, lacing his fingers through Joe’s and squeezing. 

“If Fidel and his brother are alive, and Ernesto, too, then there may be something to salvage,” Joe agreed reluctantly.

Booker spat out the twig he’d been chewing on. “I’m not built for tropical climates.” 

“Would it help if I listed all the times we’ve had it worse?” Nicky offered, dry as sherry. “Because Gallipoli comes to mind. Suvla Bay.”

“And the Moscow siege,” Joe added. 

“Which one?”

“Take your pick.” Joe shuddered expressively. “Some of us aren’t built for _cold._ ”

“Or what about—” Nicky broke off, holding up his hand. “Do you hear that?” he asked, in a much lower voice.

Instantly alert, Joe strained his ears beyond the usual night sounds of the mountain. He heard a noise like something very heavy was being dragged through the underbrush, and then a cough, accompanied by wet, ragged breathing. “What in the name of—” he began, but Nicky had leapt to his feet.

“Argentino!” he called joyously, as a man staggered into the clearing, bent double, leaning on the butt of his rifle.

“Italiano?” the man wheezed. “…Moro? …Frenchman?”

It was indeed Ernesto the Argentine, alive but nearly prostrate with asthma. He’d lost his atomizer during the landing, so there was nothing to do but pound on his back for a good hour until he could breathe a little more easily. Once he was no longer blue in the face, he lit his pipe, and, with the stem clamped between his teeth, inquired how their vacation had been.

“What vacation?” snarled Booker, whose sense of humor hadn’t improved.  
  


*

  
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna’s biggest secret was that he spoke English and spoke it excellently. He pretended that he did not, because he considered English to be the language of imperialism and would feign incomprehension whenever it was spoken. But in reality, El Che’s English was all tight corners and crisp edges and his accent was better than Nicolò’s.

The Argentine exhibited behaviors that were baffling to his rougher companions—patience, reserve, and courtesy, to name a few—and transmitted with every gesture an urbane self-assurance that made Yusuf think of, well, Nicolò. Ernesto was a Marxist, a soldier, and a physician, and Nicky had decided months ago in Mexico that he was the real brains of the revolution, the power behind Fidel Castro. Joe was glad they had found him, but he suffered a pang of jealousy whenever he saw Nicky and the Argentine deep in conversation. If he drifted past to eavesdrop, though, their subject was always, invariably, capitalism.

“A Washington millionaire has offered Fidel fifty thousand dollars for the 26th of July Movement if we take Santa Clara,” he heard Ernesto confide one afternoon, as they traipsed desultorily up an incline, hoping they might spot other _Granma_ survivors from the higher vantage.

Nicky shook his head. “Don’t fuck with the Americans, Che.”

“Not even with their American dollars, Italiano?”

“It is impossible to defeat imperialism without first identifying its head, and that head is the United States,” Nicky said. His Spanish had evolved since they’d come to Latin America, the softened _s_ ’s and _z_ ’s of bourgeois Castilian giving way to sharper consonants and dropped vowels. “In a capitalist system, most people live in an invisible cage, their opportunities determined by forces they do not even see. You can’t trust Washington dollars or Washington bullets, Argentino.”

The quiet authority with which his beloved spoke on these matters had the effect of making Joe hard in his pants, which were—fortunately—loose fatigues. But he didn’t get to bask long in his arousal, because on the other side of the mountain they were reunited with their fellow revolutionaries and then Fidel was the one doing all the talking again.  
  


*

  
During those endless months in the Sierra Maestra, Nicky developed a taste for the Cubans’ potent cigarillos. Joe was not altogether thrilled with this development. Whenever the two of them snuck away for some private time, he would grimace in an exaggerated sort of way before kissing him. Nicky reminded him that they had smoked all number of things in all number of ways over the centuries and he didn’t know why Joe had to kick up such a fuss now.

“Besides,” he added, as he unfastened Joe’s trousers, “I have to do _something_ to fit in. You look like them, even Booker does a bit, whereas I stick out like a—what is the English expression?—like a sore thumb, Yusuf.”

“You could grow a beard,” Joe suggested, groaning when Nicky brushed the back of his hand along his cock. “I know you’re capable of it.”

“To attract more lice?” Nicky shook his head. “I think not.”

Nicolò, Yusuf thought, possessed the startling, unearthly beauty of a fallen angel. “You _enjoy_ standing out,” he accused, a little breathlessly, and swayed closer to kiss him. Nicolò tasted like the last cigar he’d smoked, bitter and earthy, but underneath that was the essence of _Nicolò_. Or so Yusuf liked to think—he’d never been able to qualify that essence in words, despite his facility with metaphor across a great many languages. Nicolò was simply Nicolò, more eternal and more abiding than language, than thought itself.

Nicky pushed him to the ground and made him lie flat on his back. Crouched above him, he proceeded to suck him off with almost cruel skill, using every trick of tongue and fingers and barely grazing teeth. Joe flung out his arms, grasping at fistfuls of dirt, and decided he could learn to live with the cigars.  
  


*

  
They launched a series of attacks against the military barracks located throughout the mountains, seizing them one by one. Fidel was always quoting José Martí: “Whoever takes the Sierra Maestra takes Cuba.”

Their ranks had grown, the survivors of the _Granma_ augmented with local peasants and volunteers from Las Villas and La Clarita. Many of them were undisciplined and sloppy, though, and they paid for it with their lives when they faced off against Batista’s army.

“Get down, get down!” Joe bellowed at a nearby soldier, who’d leapt to his feet and started firing wildly without any sort of cover.

“I have a saint watching over me, he protects me from everything!” the man yelled back, seconds before a stray shell exploded his skull. 

“Motherfucker,” Joe fumed, while Booker shouted uselessly in French. Everywhere Joe looked, men were on the ground bleeding, and he had to grit his teeth and watch as Nicky set down his sniper rifle and crawled through the grass towards the wounded. Nicky slapped their faces and told them not to fall asleep; Joe was pretty sure he took a few bullets in the process, but there was no point telling him to take cover. Nicky would be out there placing tourniquets and shielding the vulnerable with his own deathless flesh whether Joe liked it or not.

Booker, however, shouted himself hoarse: “Nicky, get the hell out of there! They’re as good as dead, you stupid fuck, give it up!” He rounded on Joe. “What in the name of Christ is wrong with him?”

“Nicky doesn’t like to watch people die,” Joe said simply, taking careful aim at a soldier on the roof of the compound. He pulled the trigger: the man went down. He was nowhere near as good a shot as Nicky, but he was better than most. “It’s not in his nature.”

“Fucking shit, I hate this,” Booker growled. He was at that tricky stage of immortality where he guarded his deaths a little jealously; he’d graduated from his early nihilistic phase tempting and testing fate by dying with abandon at every opportunity. Two world wars will do that to a man, rob him of his youthful enthusiasm for death. It had been different for Yusuf and Nicolò, of course. They had emerged from their mutual murder spree drunk on an intoxicating cocktail of lust and enmity, and after all the enmity had burnt away, lust looked itself in the mirror and saw love looking back. Love had steadied Yusuf and Nicolò; they were no longer profligate with their deaths, but they did not shrink from them, either, especially if by dying one could protect the other from the same. 

Joe hoped Booker would find a similar peace, one day.

It was a delicate balance, immortality.  
  


*

  
Joe sucked Nicky off in the barracks armory—on his knees, worshiping him. Nicky’s hips were bucking uncontrollably like he was a marionette and Joe the puppeteer plucking at his strings. Both his hands were buried in Joe’s hair; every time he yanked, Joe groaned around his cock and Nicky would groan, too, very quietly. Joe drew back to put more of his tongue to use, lapping wetly at him, and Nicky untangled one of his hands to shove a fist between his teeth and stifle himself as he came.

Joe then found himself dragged to his feet and hungrily kissed. Nicky swirled his tongue around the inside of his mouth, tasting what must have been traces of himself there on Joe’s tongue. Joe rubbed vigorously against Nicky’s hip and groped at his backside, beginning to thrust upward. Nicky pushed him away, just far enough to get a hand around him through his trousers, and Joe’s mouth fell open as he worked himself against Nicky’s palm, letting out short panting breaths at every stroke. Nicky finally slipped his hand inside, fingertips light and teasing, then taking firmer hold of his cock, and Joe sighed, so turned on and ready to come, and somebody was whistling La Marseillaise—

“Shit,” Nicky said, abruptly withdrawing his hand. “The signal. Someone’s coming.”

The two of them scrambled to fix their clothing. Joe seized a rifle at random and became very involved in stripping it down—wishing Nicky were stripping _him_ down instead, right now, in a bed, somewhere with a little fucking privacy, maybe—

The door to the armory opened, revealing Ernesto Guevara and Booker, the latter of whom was whistling the final evocative notes of his country’s anthem. Booker grinned at the sight of them, flushed and disheveled, and Joe remembered, belatedly, that Booker always whistled that damned tune to announce his presence when he suspected the two of them might be fucking and he needed to interrupt them. Joe shot Sebastien a wink, and Nicky offered a grateful little nod.

Booker winked in return.

He’d come a long way, Sebastien had.

Ernesto frowned, then shook his head as if to dispel a troublesome fly. “Italiano,” he said, addressing himself to Nicky.

“Argentino?” Nicky replied easily, as if Fidel’s right-hand man—the brains of the revolution—had not very nearly caught them in flagrant violation of the revolutionary code. Communist militants weren’t supposed to fiddle with each other’s cocks; it was considered too much of a distraction from the glorious cause. Joe had to admire Nicky’s composure. But then, he thought, a little sourly, Nicky had gotten to come and he had not, thanks to El Che’s untimely interruption. 

“Can you help me in the infirmary?” Guevara asked. “I have a line of campesinos out the door, all wanting to see a doctor. They’ve never seen one before.”

“You know I am not a physician, more of a… combat medic, yes?” Nicky said, businesslike, dusting off his fatigues. “What are they sick with, Ernesto?”

“Sick with working too much, sick with too little to eat… No, Italiano, I mean they literally just want to _see_ a doctor…”

The two of them walked away down the hall, leaving Joe alone with Booker.

“Tough break, brother,” Booker said sympathetically.  
  


*

  
Fidel was confident they were winning.

“Are we though?” Joe asked Nicky in quiet Arabic as they squatted in a circle with some of the other leaders, debating the utility of descending from the mountains for an offensive strike. “We have the advantage up here, but it will be different in the cities.”

“When people hate their government, it is not so hard to take it down,” Nicky pointed out in the same language, puffing away on a cigar.

“Batista’s armies are well fortified in Santa Clara and La Habana. We’ll never match them for numbers.”

“They might be convinced to change sides,” Nicky suggested. “Why do they fight for Batista? I doubt they know themselves. Bigger is not necessarily stronger.”

“Yes, love, but we need more machine guns. _Patria o muerte_ will only get you so far when you’re using—” 

“Anything you’d like to share with the group, Comandante José, Comandante Nicolás?” Fidel interrupted, looking at them crossly over his spectacles. “This is a war council, not an opportunity to practice your Greek.”

“Arabic,” Booker murmured under his breath. 

“I said we need a bigger army for better odds in the cities, but Nicolás disagrees,” Joe said, switching back to Spanish. 

“What’s your opinion, then?” Ernesto asked Nicky.

“Military science assumes the bigger the army, the stronger it is.” Nicky exhaled a cloud of pungent cigar smoke. “But final strength comes down to more than just physical capacity, no? It’s also the spirit of your troops, men and women who understand _why_ they are fighting—”

“He’s talking about literacy,” Joe said, catching on. “You ought to open a school up here in the mountains for the peasants. A nation that can’t read or write is a nation easily deceived, comrades. Batista has only clung to power because your people lack the tools to oppose him—”

“Teach them, and they will rebuild this country for themselves,” Nicky concluded.

The proposal was discussed and summarily agreed upon. “I’ve never met men such as yourselves,” Ernesto remarked. “You are very rare revolutionaries, my friends. Such synchronicity between you, sometimes I think you share a single soul.”  
  


*

  
The rebels had acquired a gigantic bazooka from somewhere, and Fidel’s brother Raúl assumed custody of it. As they fought to repel Batista’s army at La Plata, though, it soon became apparent that the younger Castro had no clue how to operate it. He sent two precious warheads splashing harmlessly into the sea, and Joe wanted to punch him. Fucking nepotism. There was no place for it in a revolution.

“Give the bazooka to Nicolás, you idiot!” he bellowed over the gunfire. “He’s the best shot we have, trust me!”

Raúl took some convincing, but eventually he surrendered the weapon. Joe helped Nicky settle it on his shoulder and shoved another rocket down the launch tube. Nicky took only a second to aim, then sent the missile soaring into the enemy encampment. With Joe covering him, he repeated the performance four, five, six times until no more warheads remained. Batista’s battalion scattered and fled, their fortress in flames.

Nicky sat back on his heels, eyes large and incandescent in the half-light. He had a streak of soot across his cheek and Joe thought he had never looked more beautiful.

He took a bullet for Ernesto later that night—Nicky did—which was bothersome, because then they had to put Nicky’s arm in a sling and pretend they’d found some other doctor to treat him, but even Joe had to concede that Nicky had been correct to save the brains of the revolution from premature death.  
  


*

  
The trouble with Cuba, Yusuf would later realize, was that they had actually believed in it, Nicolò especially. They should have known better, of course. “All revolutions are ultimately disappointments”—that was Andromache’s mantra, and they’d seen it for themselves, time and time again: the Americans were slaveholders, the French cut off heads, and the tragedy of King Christophe in Haiti was enough to make anyone think twice about overthrowing their _ancien régime._ Why should Cuba have been any different?

Over the next few months, the revolutionaries took a string of towns like lightning, and their ranks swelled with volunteers. Up in the Sierra Maestra, they built a hospital, a printing press, a power plant, and—under Joe and Nicky’s supervision—a school. The tide had turned. They would take the city of Santa Clara, then march on Havana…

…But first, Joe dragged Nicky into an outbuilding to kiss him. He backed him against a wall and pinned him there like a starfish. Nicky sank his teeth into Joe’s lower lip and made a muffled, happy sound as Joe rocked against him. Nicky fumbled with their belts, and Joe would have sold both his soul _and_ the revolution for the chance to bed him properly. He wanted to be inside Nicky, wanted Nicky inside him; he was tired of furtive handjobs and the occasional rushed blowjob, he wanted to _make love_ to him. Neither of them heard the approaching footsteps; this time there was no Booker to whistle La Marseillaise—

“What the fuck?”—except it was Spanish, “¿Qué carajo?”—and for a few critical seconds Joe’s brain could not recall how he ought to react to this. When he and Nicky, similarly disoriented, did finally manage to disengage themselves, Ernesto Guevara was staring at them with horror and contempt, and his Glock was pointed directly at Nicky’s heart.

“You know, I wondered about the two of you,” he said. “Early on. Always sharing a bedroll, always a little too close… but then I saw you fight, and I thought, impossible—no pervert would be man enough to fight as these men fight, because they are the very embodiments of revolutionary manhood, avatars of el hombre nuevo…”

Joe would have been happy to throttle the brains of the revolution then and there—Glock or no Glock—but Nicky put a restraining hand on his sleeve.

“Ernesto,” Nicky said calmly, “you do not understand.”

“I understand just fine, comrade. You hide it well, but your vice is symptomatic of bourgeois decadence and irrefutable proof that you are no true revolutionary at all,” Guevara said. He was breathing heavily, like an angry bull, and he still had his gun pointed at Nicky. “You’re an impostor, an enemy of the revolution—” 

At that, Joe’s temper sparked and caught light. “Oh, shut up will you, you stupid prick!” he exclaimed. “Nicolás saved your life, you’d be dead if it weren’t for him!” 

“And now that I’m in his debt, he probably expects me to share his perversion—”

Nicky had always been quick, and now he moved faster than a striking snake, smoothly disarming Guevara and confiscating the gun before it could go off. “Share?” he said. “José and I do not _share_ , Argentino. Never.”

“I’m not going to beg for my life. Not from a pair of perverts,” Guevara said flatly.

Nicky smiled, cold and dangerous. “Good. It is not in my nature to be merciful to men deserving of death.”

Joe didn’t think Nicky actually meant to kill Guevara—although he was in no rush to disabuse El Che of that notion. Instead, he saw the opportunity for a teachable moment and hoped Nicky would indulge him. “You misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” he informed Guevara. “This man isn’t my weakness or my perversion, he is the love of my life. We share more than your puerile brain could ever dream of. You think we kiss in the shadows because we’re ashamed? You think we stick our cocks in each other because we’re bored? Not even marriage describes what Nicolò is to me, and our love is so much greater than your risible notions of manhood and revolution.”

“Romantic as ever, _Yusuf_.” Nicky elbowed him, and Joe realized he’d forgotten to use their flimsy Hispanophone aliases. If only calling each other Nicolò and Yusuf were the most compromising indiscretion they’d committed today—

“I wish you hadn’t said that.” Guevara shook his head; he seemed genuinely sad. “You are prodigious soldiers, and if we weren’t at war, I would attempt to cure you of your anti-social behaviors. But you understand, don’t you, that if you don’t kill me, I will have to see you punished to the full extent of the revolutionary code?”

“The revolutionary code,” Nicky repeated thoughtfully. “Tell me, Yusuf, what do _you_ think is the most important quality for a revolutionary to possess?”

“Love,” Joe replied, simply.

“ _Love_?” Guevara echoed.

“A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love,” Joe said, gazing into Nicky’s eyes. “Love of humanity, of justice, and of truth. My Nicolò is the purest embodiment of this love, Che, he is the truest revolutionary you will ever meet. If you live long enough, perhaps you will understand.”

“I fear he will not live long at all,” Nicky said.

***

“Are you serious?” Nile exclaims. “Che Guevara kicked you and Nicky out of the Cuban Revolution because he caught you _kissing_?”

“In the end he begged us to stay,” Joe says contemptuously. He stares out the window, watching Nicky put himself through his paces with the longsword. It’s a magnificent sight, the blade slicing through the air like a beam of light, and Nicolò whirling faster than a dervish. Beautiful and deadly.

“…Joe?”

“Sorry,” he excuses himself. “I’m easily distracted.”

“By Nicky, yeah.”

“Can you blame me?” He smiles. “Look at him, Nile. Have you ever seen anyone more—”

“All right, all right, keep it in your pants,” Nile interrupts, flapping a hand at him. “So, Che…?” 

“Nicky and I grabbed Booker—” he swallows roughly, the name sticking a little in his throat—"and we left. We stole a couple motorbikes and a radio, got in touch with Andy, and arranged a rendezvous in Santa Clara. But Guevara and his column showed up the next day—to take the city, I mean—and at one point Batista’s army had him pinned down in a little cul-de-sac. That whole battle was a clusterfuck, Nile, the guerrillas didn’t know shit about urban warfare, and Guevara was toast. Is that expression still in use? ‘Toast’?”

“I think it’s more of a boomer thing,” Nile says doubtfully, and Joe isn’t sure what that means, so, shrugging, he continues.

“Well, let us say that Che was roadkill, or he would have been, had my Nicolò not taken pity. It was a superb bit of shooting, Nile, I wish you could have seen it.” He sighs rapturously, picturing Nicky on the roof with his sniper rifle, picking off government soldiers with rapid, unerring precision. “Not that Guevara deserved it, the fanatical bastard—all that shit about the New Man, I really couldn’t deal with him. But he was smarter than Castro, and Nicky thought it would be worse for the Cuban people if he died. And it probably would have been. If the CIA hadn’t killed him a few years later, maybe the country wouldn’t have gone to hell so fast. Who knows?”

Nile shakes her head. “That’s some crazy fuckin’ shit right there, Joe. I can hardly believe it.”

“Nor I,” Joe concurs. “Andy is right when she says all revolutions are ultimately disappointments, and—”

“Does Nicky do that a lot? Take pity?” 

“He has the rare ability to look at the big picture,” Joe says. “It’s not actually pity, or mercy, though he can be merciful when he chooses to be.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but…” Nile frowns.

“By all means!” Joe beams. He has yet to see Nile be anything but well-mannered, and he is eager to learn what constitutes rudeness to this extraordinary twenty-first century woman.

“How many times did you and Nicky get into trouble because you couldn’t keep your hands off each other?”

“Oh, Nile.” Joe laughs long and hard. “More times than I can ever hope to remember.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for reading! While loosely accurate, this story condenses and simplifies many events during the guerrillas' years-long campaign in the Sierra Maestra. It's not intended as any sort of referendum on the Cuban Revolution and its principal actors, or on the subsequent Castro government. (But their punitive stance on homosexuality is, alas, very accurate.) Thank you again, and I always love to hear from you!


End file.
